Katherine Farquhar was a handsome woman of forty, no longer slim,
but attractive in her soft, full, feminine way. The French porters
ran round her, getting a voluptuous pleasure from merely carrying
her bags. And she gave them ridiculously high tips, because, in
the first place, she had never really known the value of money, and
secondly, she had a morbid fear of underpaying anyone, but
particularly a man who was eager to serve her.

It was really a joke to her, how eagerly these Frenchmen - all sorts
of Frenchmen - ran round her and Madamed her. Their voluptuous
obsequiousness. Because, after all, she was Boche. Fifteen years
of marriage to an Englishman - or rather to two Englishmen - had not
altered her racially. Daughter of a German Baron she was, and
remained, in her own mind and body, although England had become her
life-home. And surely she looked German, with her fresh complexion
and her strong, full figure. But like most people in the world,
she was a mixture, with Russian blood and French blood also in her
veins. And she had lived in one country and another, till she was
somewhat indifferent to her surroundings. So that perhaps the
Parisian men might be excused for running round her so eagerly, and
getting a voluptuous pleasure from calling a taxi for her, or
giving up a place in the omnibus to her, or carrying her bags, or
holding the menu card before her. Nevertheless, it amused her.
And she had to confess she liked them, these Parisians. They had
their own kind of manliness, even if it wasn't an English sort; and
if a woman looked pleasant and soft-fleshed, and a wee bit
helpless, they were ardent and generous. Katherine understood so
well that Frenchmen were rude to the dry, hard-seeming, competent
Englishwoman or American. She sympathized with the Frenchman's
point of view: too much obvious capacity to help herself is a
disagreeable trait in a woman.

At the Gare de l'Est, of course, everybody was expected to be
Boche, and it was almost a convention, with the porters, to assume
a certain small-boyish superciliousness. Nevertheless, there was
the same voluptuous scramble to escort Katherine Farquhar to her
seat in the first-class carriage. MADAME was travelling alone.

She was going to Germany via Strasburg, meeting her sister in Baden-
Baden. Philip, her husband, was in Germany collecting some sort of
evidence for his newspaper. Katherine felt a little weary of
newspapers, and of the sort of "evidence" that is extracted out of
nowhere to feed them. However, Philip was quite clever, he was a
little somebody in the world.

Her world, she had realized, consisted almost entirely of little
somebodies. She was outside the sphere of the nobodies, always had
been. And the Somebodies with a capital S, were all safely dead.
She knew enough of the world to-day to know that it is not going to
put up with any great Somebody: but many little nobodies and a
sufficient number of little somebodies. Which, after all, is as it
should be, she felt.

Sometimes she had vague misgivings.

Paris, for example, with its Louvre and its Luxembourg and its
cathedral, seemed intended for Somebody. In a ghostly way it
called for some supreme Somebody. But all its little men, nobodies
and somebodies, were as sparrows twittering for crumbs, and
dropping their little droppings on the palace cornices.

To Katherine, Paris brought back again her first husband, Alan
Anstruther, that red-haired fighting Celt, father of her two grown-
up children. Alan had had a weird innate conviction that he was
beyond ordinary judgment. Katherine could never quite see where it
came in. Son of a Scottish baronet, and captain in a Highland
regiment did not seem to her stupendous. As for Alan himself, he
was handsome in uniform, with his kilt swinging and his blue eye
glaring. Even stark naked and without any trimmings, he had a
bony, dauntless, overbearing manliness of his own. The one thing
Katherine could NOT QUITE appreciate was his silent, indomitable
assumption that he was actually firstborn, a born lord. He was a
clever man too, ready to assume that General This or Colonel That
might really be his superior. Until he actually came into contact
with General This or Colonel That. Whereupon his overweening blue
eye arched in his bony face, and a faint tinge of contempt infused
itself into his homage.

Lordly or not, he wasn't much of a success in the worldly sense.
Katherine had loved him, and he had loved her: that was
indisputable. But when it came to innate conviction of lordliness,
it was a question which of them was worse. For she, in her
amiable, queen-bee self thought that ultimately hers was the right
to the last homage.

Alan had been too unyielding and haughty to say much. But
sometimes he would stand and look at her in silent rage, wonder,
and indignation. The wondering indignation had been ALMOST too
much for her. What did the man think he was?

He was one of the hard, clever Scotsmen, with a philosophic
tendency, but without sentimentality. His contempt of Nietzsche,
whom she adored, was intolerable. Alan just asserted himself like
a pillar of rock, and expected the tides of the modern world to
recede around him. They didn't.

So he concerned himself with astronomy, gazing through a telescope
and watching the worlds beyond worlds. Which seemed to give him
relief.

After ten years, they had ceased to live together, passionate as
they both were. They were too proud and unforgiving to yield to
one another, and much too haughty to yield to any outsider.

Alan had a friend, Philip, also a Scotsman, and a university
friend. Philip, trained for the bar, had gone into journalism, and
had made himself a name. He was a little black Highlander, of the
insidious sort, clever, and KNOWING. This look of knowing in his
dark eyes, and the feeling of secrecy that went with his dark
little body, made him interesting to women. Another thing he could
do was to give off a great sense of warmth and offering, like a dog
when it loves you. He seemed to be able to do this at will. And
Katherine, after feeling cool about him and rather despising him
for years, at last fell under the spell of the dark, insidious
fellow.

"You!" she said to Alan, whose overweening masterfulness drove her
wild. "You don't even know that a woman exists. And that's where
Philip Farquhar is more than you are. He DOES know something of
what a woman IS."

"Bah! the little - - " said Alan, using an obscene word of
contempt.

Nevertheless, the friendship endured, kept up by Philip, who had an
almost uncanny love for Alan. Alan was mostly indifferent. But he
was used to Philip, and habit meant a great deal to him.

"Alan really is an amazing man!" Philip would say to Katherine.
"He is the only real man, what I call a real man, that I have ever
met."

"But why is he the only real man?" she asked. "Don't you call
YOURSELF a real man?"

"Oh, I - I'm different! My strength lies in giving in - and then
recovering myself. I do let myself be swept away. But so far,
I've always managed to get myself back again. Alan - " and Philip
even had a half-reverential, half-envious way of uttering the word -
"Alan NEVER lets himself be swept away. And he's the only man I
know who doesn't."

"Yah!" she said. "He is fooled by plenty of things. You can fool
him through his vanity."

"No," said Philip. "Never altogether. You CAN'T deceive him right
through. When a thing really touches Alan, it is tested once and
for all. You know if it's false or not. He's the only man I ever
met who CAN'T HELP being real."

"Ha! You overrate his reality," said Katherine, rather scornfully.

And later, when Alan shrugged his shoulders with that mere
indifferent tolerance, at the mention of Philip, she got angry.

"You are a poor friend," she said.

"Friend!" he answered. "I never was Farquhar's friend! If he
asserts that he's mine, that's his side of the question. I never
positively cared for the man. He's too much over the wrong side of
the border for me."

"Then," she answered, "you've no business to let him CONSIDER he is
your friend. You've no right to let him think so much of you. You
should tell him you don't like him."

"I've told him a dozen times. He seems to enjoy it. It seems part
of his game."

And he went away to his astronomy.

Came the war, and the departure of Alan's regiment for France.

"There!" he said. "Now you have to pay the penalty of having
married a soldier. You find him fighting your own people. So it
is."

She was too much struck by this blow even to weep.

"Good-bye!" he said, kissing her gently, lingeringly. After all,
he had been a husband to her.

And as he looked back at her, with the gentle, protective husband-
knowledge in his blue eyes, and at the same time that other quiet
realization of destiny, her consciousness fluttered into
incoherence. She only wanted to alter everything, to alter the
past, to alter all the flow of history - the terrible flow of
history. Secretly somewhere inside herself she felt that with her
queen-bee love, and queen-bee will, she COULD divert the whole flow
of history - nay, even reverse it.

But in the remote, realizing look that lay at the back of his eyes,
back of all his changeless husband-care, she saw that it could
never be so. That the whole of her womanly, motherly concentration
could never put back the great flow of human destiny. That, as he
said, only the cold strength of a man, accepting the destiny of
destruction, could see the human flow through the chaos and beyond
to a new outlet. But the chaos first, and the long rage of
destruction.

For an instant her will broke. Almost her soul seemed broken. And
then he was gone. And as soon as he was gone she recovered the
core of her assurance.

Philip was a great consolation to her. He asserted that the war
was monstrous, that it should never have been, and that men should
refuse to consider it as anything but a colossal, disgraceful
accident.

She, in her German soul, knew that it was no accident. It was
inevitable, and even necessary. But Philip's attitude soothed her
enormously, restored her to herself.

Alan never came back. In the spring of 1915 he was missing. She
had never mourned for him. She had never really considered him
dead. In a certain sense she had triumphed. The queen-bee had
recovered her sway, as queen of the earth; the woman, the mother,
the female with the ear of corn in her hand, as against the man
with the sword.

Philip had gone through the war as a journalist, always throwing
his weight on the side of humanity, and human truth and peace. He
had been an inexpressible consolation. And in 1921 she had married
him.

The thread of fate might be spun, it might even be measured out,
but the hand of Lachesis had been stayed from cutting it through.

At first it was wonderfully pleasant and restful and voluptuous,
especially for a woman of thirty-eight, to be married to Philip.
Katherine felt he caressed her senses, and soothed her, and gave
her what she wanted.

Then, gradually, a curious sense of degradation started in her
spirit. She felt unsure, uncertain. It was almost like having a
disease. Life became dull and unreal to her, as it had never been
before. She did not even struggle and suffer. In the numbness of
her flesh she could feel no reactions. Everything was turning into
mud.

Then again, she would recover, and ENJOY herself wonderfully. And
after a while, the suffocating sense of nullity and degradation
once more. Why, why, why did she feel degraded, in her secret
soul? NEVER, of course, outwardly.

The memory of Alan came back into her. She still thought of him
and his relentlessness with an arrested heart, but without the
angry hostility she used to feel. A little awe of him, of his
memory, stole back into her spirit. She resisted it. She was not
used to feeling awe.

She realized, however, the difference between being married to a
soldier, a ceaseless born fighter, a sword not to be sheathed, and
this other man, this cunning civilian, this subtle equivocator,
this adjuster of the scales of truth.

Philip was cleverer than she was. He set her up, the queen-bee,
the mother, the woman, the female judgment, and he served her with
subtle, cunning homage. He put the scales, the balance in her
hand. But also, cunningly, he blindfolded her, and manipulated the
scales when she was sightless.

Dimly she realized all this. But only dimly, confusedly, because
she was blindfolded. Philip had the subtle, fawning power that
could keep her always blindfolded.

Sometimes she gasped and gasped from her oppressed lungs. And
sometimes the bony, hard, masterful, but honest face of Alan would
come back, and suddenly it would seem to her that she was all right
again, that the strange, voluptuous suffocation, which left her
soul in mud, was gone, and she could breathe air of the open
heavens once more. Even fighting air.

It came to her on the boat crossing the Channel. Suddenly she
seemed to feel Alan at her side again, as if Philip had never
existed. As if Philip had never meant anything more to her than
the shop-assistant measuring off her orders. And, escaping, as it
were, by herself across the cold, wintry Channel, she suddenly
deluded herself into feeling as if Philip had never existed, only
Alan had ever been her husband. He was her husband still. And she
was going to meet him.

This gave her her blitheness in Paris, and made the Frenchman so
nice to her. For the Latins love to feel a woman is really
enveloped in the spell of some man. Beyond all race is the problem
of man and woman.

Katherine now sat dimly, vaguely excited and almost happy in the
railway-carriage on the Est railroad. It was like the old days
when she was going home to Germany. Or even more like the old days
when she was coming back to Alan. Because, in the past, when he
was her husband, feel as she might towards him, she could never get
over the sensation that the wheels of the railway-carriage had
wings, when they were taking her back to him. Even when she knew
that he was going to be awful to her, hard and relentless and
destructive, still the motion went on wings.

Whereas towards Philip she moved with a strange, disintegrating
reluctance. She decided not to think of him.

As she looked unseeing out of the carriage window, suddenly, with a
jolt, the wintry landscape realized itself in her consciousness.
The flat, grey, wintry landscape, ploughed fields of greyish earth
that looked as if they were compound of the clay of dead men.
Pallid, stark, thin trees stood like wire beside straight, abstract
roads. A ruined farm between a few more wire trees. And a dismal
village filed past, with smashed houses like rotten teeth between
the straight rows of the village street.

With sudden horror she realized that she must be in the Marne
country, the ghastly Marne country, century after century digging
the corpses of frustrated men into its soil. The border country,
where the Latin races and the Germanic neutralize one another into
horrid ash.

Perhaps even the corpse of her own man among that grey clay.

It was too much for her. She sat ashy herself with horror, wanting
to escape.

"If I had only known," she said. "If only I had known, I would
have gone by Basle."

The train drew up at Soissons; name ghastly to her. She simply
tried to make herself unreceptive to everything. And mercifully
luncheon was served, she went down to the restaurant car, and sat
opposite to a little French officer in horizon-blue uniform, who
suggested anything but war. He looked so naïve, rather childlike
and nice, with the certain innocence that so many French people
preserve under their so-called wickedness, that she felt really
relieved. He bowed to her with an odd, shy little bow when she
returned him his half-bottle of red wine, which had slowly jigged
its way the length of the table, owing to the motion of the train.
How nice he was! And how he would give himself to a woman, if she
would only find real pleasure in the male that he was.

Nevertheless, she herself felt very remote from this business of
male and female, and giving and taking.

After luncheon, in the heat of the train and the flush of her half-
bottle of white wine, she went to sleep again, her feet grilling
uncomfortably on the iron plate of the carriage floor. And as she
slept, life, as she had known it, seemed all to turn artificial to
her, the sunshine of the world an artificial light, with smoke
above, like the light of torches, and things artificially growing,
in a night that was lit up artificially with such intensity that it
gave the illusion of day. It had been an illusion, her life-day,
as a ballroom evening is an illusion. Her love and her emotions,
her very panic of love, had been an illusion. She realized how
love had become panic-stricken inside her, during the war.

And now even this panic of love was an illusion. She had run to
Philip to be saved. And now, both her panic-love and Philip's
salvation were an illusion.

What remained then? Even panic-stricken love, the intensest thing,
perhaps, she had ever felt, was only an illusion. What was left?
The grey shadows of death?

When she looked out again it was growing dark, and they were at
Nancy. She used to know this country as a girl. At half-past
seven she was in Strasburg, where she must stay the night as there
was no train over the Rhine till morning.

The porter, a blond, hefty fellow, addressed her at once in
Alsatian German. He insisted on escorting her safely to her hotel -
a German hotel - keeping guard over her like an appointed sentinel,
very faithful and competent, so different from Frenchmen.

It was a cold, wintry night, but she wanted to go out after dinner
to see the minster. She remembered it all so well, in that other
life.

The wind blew icily in the street. The town seemed empty, as if
its spirit had left it. The few squat, hefty foot-passengers were
all talking the harsh Alsatian German. Shop-signs were in French,
often with a little concession to German underneath. And the shops
were full of goods, glutted with goods from the once-German
factories of Mulhausen and other cities.

She crossed the night-dark river, where the washhouses of the
washerwomen were anchored along the stream, a few odd women still
kneeling over the water's edge, in the dim electric light, rinsing
their clothes in the grim, cold water. In the big square the icy
wind was blowing, and the place seemed a desert. A city once more
conquered.

After all she could not remember her way to the cathedral. She saw
a French policeman in his blue cape and peaked cap, looking a
lonely, vulnerable, silky specimen in this harsh Alsatian city.
Crossing over to him she asked him in French where was the
cathedral.

He pointed out to her, the first turning on the left. He did not
seem hostile: nobody seemed really hostile. Only the great frozen
weariness of winter in a conquered city, on a weary everlasting
border-line.

And the Frenchmen seemed far more weary, and also, more sensitive
than the crude Alsatians.

She remembered the little street, the old, overhanging houses with
black timbers and high gables. And like a great ghost, a reddish
flush in its darkness, the uncanny cathedral breasting the oncomer,
standing gigantic, looking down in darkness out of darkness, on the
pigmy humanness of the city. It was built of reddish stone, that
had a flush in the night, like dark flesh. And vast, an
incomprehensibly tall, strange thing, it looked down out of the
night. The great rose window, poised high, seemed like the breast
of the vast Thing, and prisms and needles of stone shot up, as if
it were plumage, dimly, half-visible in heaven.

There it was, in the upper darkness of the ponderous winter night,
like a menace. She remembered, her spirit used in the past to soar
aloft with it. But now, looming with a faint rust of blood out of
the upper black heavens, the Thing stood suspended, looking down
with vast, demonish menace, calm and implacable.

Mystery and dim, ancient fear came over the woman's soul. The
cathedral looked so strange and demonish-heathen. And an ancient,
indomitable blood seemed to stir in it. It stood there like some
vast silent beast with teeth of stone, waiting, and wondering when
to stoop against this pallid humanity.

And dimly she realized that behind all the ashy pallor and sulphur
of our civilization, lurks the great blood-creature waiting,
implacable and eternal, ready at last to crush our white
brittleness and let the shadowy blood move erect once more, in a
new implacable pride and strength. Even out of the lower heavens
looms the great blood-dusky Thing, blotting out the Cross it was
supposed to exalt.

As she turned to go away, to move away from the closed wings of the
minster, she noticed a man standing on the pavement, in the
direction of the post-office, which functions obscurely in the
Cathedral Square. Immediately, she knew that that man, standing
dark and motionless, was Alan. He was alone, motionless, remote.

He did not move towards her. She hesitated, then went in his
direction, as if going to the post-office. He stood perfectly
motionless, and her heart died as she drew near. Then, as she
passed, he turned suddenly, looking down on her.

It was he, though she could hardly see his face, it was so dark,
with a dusky glow in the shadow.

"Alan!" she said.

He did not speak, but laid his hand detainingly on her arm, as he
used in the early days, with strange silent authority. And turning
her with a faint pressure on her arm, he went along with her,
leisurely, through the main street of the city, under the arcade
where the shops were still lighted up.

She glanced at his face: it seemed much more dusky, and duskily
ruddy, than she had known him. He was a stranger: and yet it was
he, no other. He said nothing at all. But that was also in
keeping. His mouth was closed, his watchful eyes seemed
changeless, and there was a shadow of silence around him,
impenetrable, but not cold. Rather aloof and gentle, like the
silence that surrounds a wild animal.

She knew that she was walking with his spirit. But that even did
not trouble her. It seemed natural. And there came over her again
the feeling she had forgotten, the restful, thoughtless pleasure of
a woman who moves in the aura of the man to whom she belongs. As a
young woman she had had this unremarkable, yet very precious
feeling, when she was with her husband. It had been a full
contentment; and perhaps the fullness of it had made her
unconscious of it. Later, it seemed to her she had almost wilfully
destroyed it, this soft flow of contentment which she, a woman, had
from him as a man.

Now, afterwards, she realized it. And as she walked at his side
through the conquered city, she realized that it was the one
enduring thing a woman can have, the intangible soft flood of
contentment that carries her along at the side of the man she is
married to. It is her perfection and her highest attainment.

Now, in the afterwards, she knew it. Now the strife was gone. And
dimly she wondered why, why, why she had ever fought against it.
No matter what the man does or is, as a person, if a woman can move
at his side in this dim, full flood of contentment, she has the
highest of him, and her scratching efforts at getting more than
this, are her ignominious efforts at self-nullity.

Now, she knew it, and she submitted. Now that she was walking with
a man who came from the halls of death, to her, for her relief.
The strong, silent kindliness of him towards her, even now, was
able to wipe out the ashy, nervous horror of the world from her
body. She went at his side still and released, like one newly
unbound, walking in the dimness of her own contentment.

At the bridge-head he came to a standstill, and drew his hand from
her arm. She knew he was going to leave her. But he looked at her
from under his peaked cap, darkly but kindly, and he waved his hand
with a slight, kindly gesture of farewell and of promise, as if in
the farewell he promised never to leave her, never to let the
kindliness go out in his heart, to let it stay hers always.

She hurried over the bridge with tears running down her cheeks, and
on to her hotel. Hastily she climbed to her room. And as she
undressed, she avoided the sight of her own face in the mirror.
She must not rupture the spell of his presence.

Now, in the afterwards she realized HOW careful she must be, not to
break the mystery that enveloped her. Now that she knew he had
come back to her from the dead, she was aware how precious and how
fragile the coming was. He had come back with his heart dark and
kind, wanting her even in the afterwards. And not in any sense
must she go against him. The warm, powerful, silent ghost had come
back to her. It was he. She must not even try to think about him
definitely, not to realize him or to understand. Only in her own
woman's soul could she silently ponder him, darkly, and know him
present in her, without ever staring at him or trying to find him
out. Once she tried to lay hands on him, to HAVE him, to REALIZE
him, he would be gone for ever, and gone for ever this last
precious flood of her woman's peace.

"Ah, no!" she said to herself. "If he leaves his peace with me, I
must ask no questions whatsoever."

And she repented, silently, of the way she had questioned and
demanded answers, in the past. What were the answers, when she had
got them? Terrible ash in the mouth.

She now knew the supreme modern terror, of a world all ashy and
nerve-dead. If a man could come back out of death to save her from
this, she would not ask questions of him, but be humble, and beyond
tears grateful.

In the morning, she went out into the icy wind, under the grey sky,
to see if he would be there again. Not that she NEEDED him: his
presence was still about her. But he might be waiting.

The town was stony and cold. The people looked pale, chilled
through, and doomed in some way. Very far from her they were. She
felt a sort of pity for them, but knew she could do nothing,
nothing in time or eternity. And they looked at her, and looked
quickly away again, as if they were uneasy in themselves.

The cathedral reared its great reddish-grey façade in the stark
light; but it did not loom as in the night. The cathedral square
was hard and cold. Inside, the church was cold and repellent, in
spite of the glow of stained glass. And he was nowhere to be
found.

So she hastened away to her hotel and to the station, to catch the
10.30 train into Germany.

It was a lonely, dismal train, with a few forlorn souls waiting to
cross the Rhine. Her Alsatian porter looked after her with the
same dogged care as before. She got into the first-class carriage
that was going through to Prague - she was the only passenger
travelling first. A real French porter, in blouse and moustache,
and swagger, tried to say something a bit jeering to her, in his
few words of German. But she only looked at him, and he subsided.
He didn't really want to be rude. There was a certain hopelessness
even about that.

The train crept slowly, disheartened, out of town. She saw the
weird humped-up creature of the cathedral in the distance, pointing
its one finger above the city. Why, oh, why, had the old Germanic
races put it there, like that!

Slowly the country disintegrated into the Rhine flats and marshes,
the canals, the willow trees, the overflow streams, the wet places
frozen but not flooded. Weary the place all seemed. And old
Father Rhine flowing in greenish volume, implacable, separating the
races now weary of race struggle, but locked in the toils as in the
coils of a great snake, unable to escape. Cold, full, green, and
utterly disheartening the river came along under the wintry sky,
passing beneath the bridge of iron.

There was a long wait in Kehl, where the German officials and the
French observed a numb, dreary kind of neutrality. Passport and
customs examination was soon over. But the train waited and
waited, as if unable to get away from that one point of pure
negation, where the two races neutralized one another, and no
polarity was felt, no life - no principle dominated.

Katherine Farquhar just sat still, in the suspended silence of her
husband's return. She heeded neither French nor German, spoke one
language or the other at need, hardly knowing. She waited, while
the hot train steamed and hissed, arrested at the perfect neutral
point of the new border line, just across the Rhine.

And at last a little sun came out, and the train silently drew
away, nervously, from the neutrality.

In the great flat field, of the Rhine plain, the shallow flood
water was frozen, the furrows ran straight towards nowhere, the air
seemed frozen too, but the earth felt strong and barbaric, it
seemed to vibrate, with its straight furrows, in a deep, savage
undertone. There was the frozen, savage thrill in the air also,
something wild and unsubdued, pre-Roman.

This part of the Rhine valley, even on the right bank in Germany,
was occupied by the French; hence the curious vacancy, the
suspense, as if no men lived there, but some spirit was watching,
watching over the vast, empty, straight-furrowed fields and the
water-meadows. Stillness, emptiness, suspense, and a sense of
something still impending.

A long wait in the station of Appenweier, on the main line of the
Right-bank Railway. The station was empty. Katherine remembered
its excited, thrilling bustle in pre-war days.

"Yes," said the German guard to the station-master. "What do they
hurry us out of Strasburg for, if they are only going to keep us so
long here?"

The heavy Badisch German! The sense of resentful impotence in the
Germans! Katherine smiled to herself. She realized that here the
train left the occupied territory.

At last they set off, northwards, free for the moment, in Germany.
It was the land beyond the Rhine, Germany of the pine forests. The
very earth seemed strong and unsubdued, bristling with a few reeds
and bushes, like savage hair. There was the same silence, and
waiting, and the old barbaric undertone of the white-skinned north,
under the waning civilization. The audible overtone of our
civilization seemed to be wearing thin, the old, low, pine-forest
hum and roar of the ancient north seemed to be sounding through.
At least, in Katherine's inner ear.

And there were the ponderous hills of the Black Forest, heaped and
waiting sullenly, as if guarding the inner Germany. Black round
hills, black with forest, save where white snow-patches of field
had been cut out. Black and white, waiting there in the near
distance, in sullen guard.

She knew the country so well. But not in this present mood, the
emptiness, the sullenness, the heavy, recoiled waiting.

Steinbach! Then she was nearly there! She would have to change in
Oos, for Baden-Baden, her destination. Probably Philip would be
there to meet her in Oos; he would have come down from Heidelberg.

Yes, there he was! And at once she thought he looked ill,
yellowish. His figure hollow and defeated.

"Aren't you well?" she asked, as she stepped out of the train on to
the empty station.

"I'm so frightfully cold," he said. "I can't get warm."

"And the train was so hot," she said.

At last a porter came to carry her bags across to the little
connecting train.

"How are you?" he said, looking at her with a certain pinched look
in his face, and fear in his eyes.

"All right! It all feels very queer," she said.

"I don't know how it is," he said, "but Germany freezes my inside,
and does something to my chest."

"We needn't stay long," she said easily.

He was watching the bright look in her face. And she was thinking
how queer and chétif he looked! Extraordinary! As she looked at
him she felt for the first time, with curious clarity, that it was
humiliating to be married to him, even in name. She was humiliated
even by the fact that her name was Katherine Farquhar. Yet she
used to think it a nice name!

"Just think of me married to that little man!" she thought to
herself. "Think of my having his name!"

It didn't fit. She thought of her own name: Katherine von Todtnau;
or of her married name: Katherine Anstruther. The first seemed
most fitting. But the second was her second nature. The third,
Katherine Farquhar, wasn't her at all.

"Have you seen Marianne?" she asked.

"Oh, yes!"

He was very brief. What was the matter with him?

"You'll have to be careful, with your cold," she said politely.

"I AM careful!" he cried petulantly.

Marianne, her sister, was at the station, and in two minutes they
were rattling away in German and laughing and crying and exploding
with laughter again, Philip quite ignored. In these days of frozen
economy, there was no taxi. A porter would wheel up the luggage on
a trolley, the new arrivals walked to their little hotel, through
the half-deserted town.

"But the little one is quite nice!" said Marianne deprecatingly.

"Isn't he!" cried Katherine in the same tone.

And both sisters stood still and laughed in the middle of the
street. "The little one" was Philip.

"The other was more a man," said Marianne. "But I'm sure this one
is easier. THE LITTLE ONE! Yes, he SHOULD be easier," and she
laughed in her mocking way.

"The stand-up-mannikin!" said Katherine, referring to those little
toy men weighted at the base with lead, that always stand up again.

"Yes! Yes!" cried Marianne. "I'm sure he ALWAYS comes up again!
Prumm!" She made a gesture of knocking him over. "And there he
rises once more!" She slowly raised her hand, as if the mannikin
were elevating himself.

The two sisters stood in the street laughing consumedly.

Marianne also had lost her husband in the war. But she seemed only
more reckless and ruthless.

"Ah, Katy!" she said, after dinner. "You are always such a good
child! But you are different. Harder! No, you are not the same
good Katy, the same kind Katy. You are no longer kind."

"And you?" said Katy.

"Ah, me! I don't matter. I watch what the end will be."

Marianne was six years older than Katherine, and she had now ceased
to struggle for anything at all. She was a woman who had lived her
life. So at last, life seemed endlessly quaint and amusing to her.
She accepted everything, wondering over the powerful primitiveness
of it all, at the root-pulse.

"I don't care any more at all what people do or don't do," she
said. "Life is a great big tree, and the dead leaves fall. But
very wonderful is the pulse in the roots! So strong, and so
pitiless."

It was as if she found a final relief in the radical pitilessness
of the Tree of Life.

Philip was very unhappy in this atmosphere. At the core of him a
Scotch sentimentalist, he had calculated, very cannily, that the
emotional, sentimental values would hold good as long as he lived,
which was long enough for him. The old male pride and power were
doomed. They had finally fallen in the war. Alan with them. But
the emotional, sentimental values still held good.

Only not here in Germany. Here the very emotions had become
exhausted. "Give us pitilessness. Give us the Tree of Life in
winter, dehumanized and ruthless." So everything seemed to say.
And it was too much for him.

He wanted to be soft and sweet and loving, at evening, to
Katherine. But there came Marianne's hollow, reckless laugh at the
door; he was frustrated. And -

"Ach! Is it possible that anybody forty years old should still be
in love? Ach! I had thought it impossible any more; after the
war! Even a little indecent, shall I say!" laughed Marianne,
seeing the frustrated languishing look on his face.

"If LOVE isn't left, what is?" he said petulantly.

"Ach! I don't know! Really I don't. Can't you tell me?" she
asked with a weird naïveté of the AFTERWARDS.

He gathered himself together, the little stand-up-mannikin, waiting
till Marianne was gone and he could be softly alone with Katherine.

When the two were alone he said:

"I'm most frightfully glad you've come, Kathy. I could hardly have
held out another day without you. I feel you're the only thing on
earth that remains real."

"You don't seem very real to me," she said.

"I'm not real! I'm NOT! - not when I'm alone. But when I am with
you I am the most real man alive. I know it!"

He asserted this with vehemence and a weird, personal sort of
passion that used to thrill her, but now repelled her.

"Why should you need me?" she said. "I am real without you."

She was thinking of Alan.

This was a blow to Philip. He considered for a moment. Then he
said:

"Yes. You are! You are always real. But that's because you are a
woman. A man without a woman CAN'T be real."

He twisted his face and shook his hand with a sort of false
vehemence.

She looked at him, was repelled. After all, Alan could wander
alone in the lonely places of the dead, and still be the ultimate
real thing, to her.

She had given her allegiance elsewhere. Strange, how unspeakably
cold she felt towards this little equivocal civilian.

"Don't let us talk to-night," she said. "I am SO sleepy. I want
to go to sleep this very minute. You don't mind, do you? Good-
night!"

She went to her room, with the green glazed stove. Outside she
could see the trees of Seufzer Allee, and the intense winter night.
Curiously dark and wolfish the nights came on, with the little town
obscurely lighted, for economy's sake, and no tramcars running, for
economy's sake, and the whole place, strangely, slipping back from
our civilization, people moving in the dark like in a barbarian
village, with the thrill of fear and menace in the wolfish air.

She slept soundly, none the less. But the raw air scraped her
chest.

In the morning Philip was looking yellower, and coughing a good
deal. She urged him to stay in bed. She wanted, really, to be
free of him. And she also wanted him to be safe, too. He
insisted, however, on staying about.

She could tell he had something on his mind. At last it came out.

"Do you dream much here?" he said.

"I think I did dream," she said. "But I can't remember what
about."

"I dream terribly," he said.

"What sort of dreams?"

"All sorts!" He gave a rueful laugh. "But nearly always about
Alan." He glanced at her quickly to see how she took it. She gave
no sign.

"And what about him?" she said calmly.

"Oh! - " he gave a desperate little gesture. "Why last night I
dreamed that I woke up, and someone was lying on my bed, OUTSIDE
the bedclothes. I thought at first it was you, so I wanted to
speak to you. But I couldn't. Then I knew it was Alan, lying
there in the cold. And he was terribly heavy. He was so heavy I
couldn't move, because the bed-clothes - you know I don't have that
bolster thing - they were so tight on me, I could hardly breathe,
they were like tight lead round me. It was so awful, they were
like a lead coffin-shell. And he was lying outside with that
terrible weight. When I woke at last, I thought I WAS dead."

"It's because you've got a cold on your chest," she said. "Why
won't you stay in bed and see a doctor?"

"I don't WANT a doctor," he said.

"You're so obstinate! At least you should drink the waters here.
They'd be good for you."

During the day she walked in the woods with Marianne. It was
sunny, and there was thin snow. But the cold in the air was heavy,
stormy, unbreakable, and the woods seemed black, black. In a
hollow open space, like a bowl, were little tortured bare vines.
Never had she seen the pale vine-stocks look so tortured. And the
black trees seemed to grow out of unutterably cold depths, and they
seemed to be drinking away what warmth of life there was, while the
vines in the clearing writhed with cold as leaves writhe in a fire.

After sunset, before dinner-time, she wanted to go to drink the hot
waters from the spring at the big bath-hall under the New Castle.
Philip insisted on going with her, though she urged him to stay
indoors. They went down the dark hill and between the dark
buildings of reddish stone, like the stone of Strasburg Cathedral.

At the obscure fountain in the alcove of the courtyard a little
group of people were waiting, dark and silent, like dark spirits
round a source of steam. Some had come to drink. Some had come
for a pail of hot water. Some had come merely to warm their
fingers and get something hot inside them. Some had come
furtively, with hot-water bottles, to warm their icy beds a little.
Everybody was bed-rock poor and silent, but well-clad, respectable,
unbeaten.

Katherine and Philip waited a while. Then, in a far corner of the
dark rocky grotto, where the fountain of hot water came out of the
wall, Katherine saw Alan standing. He was standing as if waiting
his turn to drink, behind the other people. Philip apparently did
not see him.

She pressed forward in the silent sombre group of people, and held
her glass under the tap, above the pail which a man was filling.
The hot water ran over her fingers gratefully. She rinsed her
glass down the fountain bowl.

"Na!" said the man of the pail, in his rough, but reckless, good-
humoured Badisch: "Throw it in the bucket. It's only wash-water."

She laughed, and lifted her pocket-glass to drink. It was
something of an ordeal among the group of silent people there in
the almost dark. There was a feeble lamp outside in the courtyard;
inside the grotto was deep shadow.

Nevertheless, Alan was watching her, and she drank to him, in the
hot, queer, hellish-tasting water. She drank a second small
glassful. Then she filled the glass again, in front of all the
waiting people and handed it to Philip.

She did not look at Alan, but away in the courtyard, where more
people were approaching, and where the steam of the springs rose
from the grating in the ground, ghostly on the night air.

Philip drew back a little to drink. But at the first mouthful he
choked, and began to cough. He coughed and coughed, in a convulsed
spasm as if choking. She went to him anxiously. And then she saw
that Alan also had come forward, and stood beside her, behind the
coughing little Philip.

"What is it?" she said to the coughing man. "Did some of the water
go the wrong way?"

He shook his head, but could not answer. At length, exhausted, but
quiet, he handed her the glass, and they moved away from the silent
group of watchful dark people.

And Alan was walking on her other side holding her hand.

When they came into the hall of the hotel she saw with horror that
there was a red smear of blood on Philip's chin, and red blotches
on his overcoat.

"What have you done?" she cried.

He looked down at his breast, then up at her with haunted eyes.
Fear, an agony and a horror of fear in his face. He went ghastly
pale. Thinking he would swoon, she put her arm round him. But she
felt someone silently but firmly, and with strange, cold power,
pulling her arm away. She knew it was Alan.

The hotel porter helped Philip up to his room, and she assisted her
husband to undress and get to bed. But each time her hand touched
the sick man's body, to sustain him, she felt it drawn silently,
coldly, powerfully away, with complete relentlessness.

The doctor came and made his examination. He said it was not
serious: only the rupture of a superficial blood-vessel. The
patient must lie quite still and warm, and take light food. Avoid
all excitement or agitation.

Philip's face had a haunted, martyred, guilty look. She soothed
him as much as possible, but dared hardly touch him.

"Won't you sleep with me to-night, in case I dream?" he said to
her, with big, excruciating eyes full of fear.

"You'll be better alone," she said softly. "You'll be better
alone. I'll tuck you up warm, and sit with you a while. Keep
yourself all covered up!"

She tucked him close, and sat by the bed. On the other side of the
bed sat Alan, bare-headed, with his silent, expressionless, reddish
face. The closed line of his lips, under the small reddish
moustache, never changed, and he kept his eyelids half lowered.
But there was a wonderful changeless dignity in his pose, as if he
could sit thus, silent, and waiting, through the centuries. And
through the warm air of the room he radiated this strange, stony
coldness, that seemed heavy as the hand of death. It did not hurt
Katherine. But Philip's face seemed chilled and bluish.

Katherine went to her room, when the sick man slept. Alan did not
follow her. And she did not question. It was for the two men to
work out destiny between them.

In the night, towards morning she heard a hoarse, horrible cry.
She ran to Philip's room. He was sitting up in bed, blood running
down his chin, his face livid, and his eyes rolling delirious.

"What is it?" she said in panic.

"He lay on top of me!" cried Philip, rolling his eyes inwards in
horror. "He lay on top of me, and turned my heart cold and burst
my blood-vessel in my chest."

Katherine stood petrified. There was blood all over the sheets.
She rang the bell violently. Across the bed stood Alan, looking at
her with his unmoving blue eyes, just watching her. She could feel
the strange stone-coldness of his presence touching even her heart.
And she looked back at him humbly, she knew he had power over her
too. That strange, cold, stony touch on her heart.

The servants came, and the doctor. And Alan went away. Philip was
washed and changed, and went peacefully to sleep, looking like a
corpse.

The day passed slowly. Alan did not appear. Even now, Katherine
wanted him to come. Awful though he was, she wanted him to be
there, to give her her surety, even though it was only the surety
of dread; and her contentment, though it were the contentment of
death.

At night she had a sofa-bed brought for her into Philip's room. He
seemed quieter, better. She had not left him all day. And Alan
had not appeared. At half-past nine, Philip sleeping quietly, she
too lay down to sleep.

She woke in the night feeling the same stone-coldness in the air.
Had the stove gone out? Then she heard Philip's whispering call of
terror: "KATHERINE! KATHERINE!" She went over quickly, and
slipped into his bed, putting her arms round him. He was
shuddering, and stony cold. She drew him to her.

But immediately two hands cold and strong as iron seized her arms
and pulled them away. She was pushed out of the bed, and pushed on
to the floor of the bedroom. For an instant, the rage came into
her heart, she wanted to get up and fight for the dying man. But a
greater power, the knowledge of the uselessness and the fatal
dishonourableness of her womanly interference made her desist. She
lay for a time helpless and powerless on the floor, in her
nightdress.

Then she felt herself lifted. In the dimness of coming dawn, she
knew it was Alan. She could see the breast of his uniform - the old
uniform she had known long before the war. And his face bending
over her, cool and fresh.

He was still cold. But the stoniness had gone out of him, she did
not mind his coldness. He pressed her firm hand hard to his own
hard body. He was hard and cold like a tree, and alive. And the
prickling of his moustache was the cold prickling of fir-needles.

He held her fast and hard, and seemed to possess her through every
pore of her body. Not now the old, procreative way of possession.
He held her fast, and possessed her through every pore in her body.
Then he laid her in her own bed, to sleep.

When she awoke, the sun was shining, and Philip lay dead in a pool
of blood.

Somehow she did not mind. She was only thinking of Alan. After
all, she belonged to the man who could keep her. To the only man
who knew how to keep her, and could only possess her through all
the pores of her body, so that there was no recoil from him. Not
just through one act, one function holding her. But as a cloud
holds a shower.

The men that were just functional men: let them pass and perish.
She wanted her contentment like life itself, through every pore,
through every bit of her. The man who could hold her as the wind
held her, as the air held her, all surrounded. The man whose aura
permeated into every vein, through all her pores, as the scent of a
pine-tree when one stands beneath it. A man, not like a faun or a
satyr or an angel or a demon, but like the Tree of Life itself,
implacable and unquestionable and permeating, voiceless, abiding.

In the afternoon she went to walk by herself. She climbed uphill,
steep, past the New Castle, and up through the pine-woods, climbing
upwards to the Old Castle. There it stood, among dense trees, its
old, rose-red stone walls broken and silent. Two men, queer, wild
ruffians with bundles on their backs, stood in the broken, roofless
hall, looking round.

"Yes," the elder one, with the round beard, was saying, "There are
no more Dukes of Baden, and counts and barons and peers of the
realm are as much in ruin as this place. Soon we shall be all
alike, Lumpen, tramps."

"Also no more ladies," said the younger one, in a lower voice.
"Every tramp can have his lady."

Katherine heard him, with a pang of fear. Knowing the castle, she
climbed the stairs and round the balustrade above the great hall,
looking out far over the country. The sun was sinking. The Rhine
was a dim magnesium ribbon, away on the plain. Across was the
Russian Chapel; below, on the left, the town, and the Lichtenthal.
No more gamblers, no more cosmopolitan play. Evening and the dark
round hills going lonely, snow on the Merkur hill.

Mercury! Hermes! The messenger! Even as she thought it, standing
there on the wall, Alan came along and stood beside her, and she
felt at ease. The two men down below were looking up at her. They
watched in silence, not knowing the way up. They were in the cold
shadow of the hall below. A little, lingering sun, reddish, caught
her where she was, above.

Again, for the last time, she looked over the land: the sun sinking
below the Rhine, the hills of Germany this side, and the frozen
stillness of the winter afternoon. "Yes, let us go," she heard the
elder man's voice. "We are hardly men or women any more. We are
more like the men and women who have drunk in this hall, living
after our day."

"Only we eat and smile still, and the men want the women still."

"No! No! A man forgets his trouser-lining when he sees the ghost
and the woman together."

The two tramps turned and departed, heavy-shod, up the hill.

Katherine felt Alan's touch on her arm, and she climbed down from
the old, broken castle. He led her through the woods, past the red
rocks. The sun had sunk, the trees were blue. He lingered again
under a great pine-tree, in the shadow. And again, as he pressed
her fast, and pressed his cold face against her, it was as if the
wood of the tree itself were growing round her, the hard, live wood
compressing and almost devouring her, the sharp needles brushing
her face, the limbs of the living tree enveloping her, crushing her
in the last, final ecstasy of submission, squeezing from her the
last drop of her passion, like the cold, white berries of the
mistletoe on the Tree of Life.